January 22, 2013 "Information
Clearing House"
- There were no memorable lines in President Obama’s
second inaugural address. Certainly nothing like Franklin
Roosevelt’s “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,”
which was in his first inaugural, or like John F. Kennedy’s
“Ask not what your country can do for you -- ask what you
can do for your country.”

But there was plenty he said that was troubling.

The problem mostly wasn’t what he said. It was how he said
it, and what he left unsaid.

Take climate change.

The president acknowledged the problem, saying: “We will
respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the
failure to do so would betray our children and future
generations.”

So far so good, but then he didn’t talk about any serious
steps to do that, such as shutting down coal-fired
generating plants and putting a stop to plans to import
dirty, massively polluting and inefficient oil from Canadian
and US tar-sands deposits. Instead he focussed on economic
opportunities to be had if the US would start investing
seriously in new energy technology. He did not take this
unique opportunity to tell Americans honestly what the risks
of inaction are: The extinction of half the species on the
earth, including primary food sources that keep billions of
us alive, and the risk of runaway warming that could raise
the oceans by 16 to 60 feet. Instead he focussed parochially
on storms and droughts and forest fires getting worse. This
was a wasted leadership moment if there ever was one.

When JFK made his one inaugural address, the Cold War was at
its height. He didn’t fudge the moment, and instead let
Americans and the world know the gravity of the threat of
mutual global nuclear annihilation by describing the
situation thusly as “both sides overburdened by the cost of
modern weapons, both rightly alarmed by the steady spread of
the deadly atom, yet both racing to alter that uncertain
balance of terror that stays the hand of mankind's final
war.”

President Obama had the chance to lay the current even worse
crisis out with equal clarity. He blew it, instead
portraying the climate change crisis as simply an
opportunity for the US to gain or lose the leadership in a
new technological marketplace.

On education, he also narrowly focussed on schools as job
training centers, instead of as transmitters of culture,
saying: “...a modern economy requires railroads and highways
to speed travel and commerce; schools and colleges to train
our workers.”

What about training our artists, dancers, poets, historians,
writers, musicians and philosophers? Today, in school
district after school district, art and music teachers,
librarians and others are being laid off by financially
struggling school districts. Where is the president’s
leadership in trying to preserve real education in America?

The president was also disingenuous, and no more so than
when he spoke of war. At a time when the US killing machine
is still going full speed in Afghanistan, and when he
himself is cranking up the use of armed attack drones in
countries around the globe, the president, departing from
his prepared text, said that the US was “ending ten years of
war.” There was particularly loud applause at that line, but
it is simply not true. Not only is the US negotiating to
keep over 10,000 US troops indefinitely in Afghanistan, but
it is expanding its drone and Special Forces attacks in
Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan and elsewhere around the globe,
while continuing to threaten Iran with an attack.

He also said, in his prepared remarks, “We, the people,
still believe that enduring security and lasting peace do
not require perpetual war.” Yet he made no announcement of a
plan to end Congress’s 2001 Authorization for the Use of
Military Force, which over the past 12 years has turned the
US into a police state, leading the federal courts to
approve all manner of violations of the Bill of Rights and
to grant the executive branch exceptional powers on the
argument that the US is legally in a state of war and that
the 50 states themselves are part of the battlefield.

The president seems content with this situation, which is by
definition a “state of perpetual war.”

“We will defend our people and uphold our values through
strength of arms and rule of law,” he said. And yet the rest
of the world knows that America is violating the highest
law, the UN Charter, with its drone attacks and its targeted
killing programs, and by failing to prosecute those who
authorized the illegal invasion of Iraq, the deliberate
torture of captives in the Iraq and Afghan Wars. The
president went on to say, “We will show the courage to try
and resolve our differences with other nations peacefully –
not because we are naïve about the dangers we face, but
because engagement can more durably lift suspicion and
fear,” and yet there are no negotiations to end the half
century long embargo of Cuba, or to resolve disagreements
with Iran. Nor is the president demanding that America’s
client state, Israel, dependent as that country is on
billions of dollars of US military aid every year, cease its
military occupation and subjugation of Palestinians and
negotiate an end to the conflict between Israel and
Palestine.

Surely the most jarring disconnect, though, was the
inaugural celebration itself. There is no reason why a
Constitutionally-mandated ceremony has to be financed by
private money, yet the president’s Inauguration Committee
solicited and had, by this last weekend, accepted over
$124.3 million in contributions from corporations and labor
unions, according to the Center for Public Integrity. That
dwarf’s the $50 million that was raised in private donations
for the president’s first inauguration. It also came in much
bigger amounts, as the president this year dropped a $50,000
maximum donation limit he had set for his first term
Inaugural. This time the limit was set at $1 million.

The list of corporations and labor unions seeking to buy
influence through this unique funding opportunity provided
by the president includes Bank of America, Coca-Cola, FedEx,
AT&T, the health care management firms DC Health Care Inc.
and Cetene Management Corp., East Lake Management &
Development Corp., Financial Innovations, Inc., the electric
generating company Southern Company Services and
Exxon/Mobil. Exxon alone gave $260,000 to the committee.

Unions that donated included the International Association
of Fire Fighters, the International Brotherhood of
Electrical Workers, American Federation of Government
Employees, American Postal Workers Union, International
Union of Painters and Allied Trades, Laborers International
Union of North America, Sheet Metal Workers International,
United Food & Commercial Workers.

All these companies and unions are donating not out of some
sense of civic duty but to in order to buy favors from the
White House during the president’s second term.

These contributors--and especially the corporate ones, since
at least the unions are representing large numbers of
ordinary working people -- make a joke out of the lines the
President spoke when he said, “For we, the people,
understand that our country cannot succeed when a shrinking
few do very well and a growing many barely make it,” and
later, “You and I, as citizens, have the power to set this
country’s course. You and I, as citizens, have the
obligation to shape the debates of our time – not only with
the votes we cast, but with the voices we lift in defense of
our most ancient values and enduring ideals.”

If he were being honest in saying those lines, he would not
have sought or taken any money from those organizations that
clearly put big money on the Inaugural Committee’s table,
with the clear intention of controlling or influencing those
debates and the country’s future course.

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